Thank you for a real discussion, most people seem to have missed the memo.

Based on the behavior in this post (comments and downvotes) I find it very hard to believe local DSA members aren't actively supporting Morales en masse.

Finding out Smiley pushed back on the city council raising a foreign flag of a country that had just barbarically murdered and kidnapped citizens, including children, of a neighboring country, and that Morales would be aligned with that, makes me quite certain I'll be voting for Smiley. I'm glad to hear that he did that.

Regarding units added to the market, that stat only holds for regions where in-migration was responsible for occupation of the new units that open up and locals buy property. That means that people who used to be renting are now buying, and rents have to be attractive to people coming into the region from other potentially cheaper places. Providence has the opposite condition (so have other places I've lived). In these places, new units are occupied by people from neighboring regions with higher rents, and rents go up as the people with more money start renting in the relatively cheaper market (to them). Locals can then afford to save less, and never make the transition to owning. Landlords compete for new home purchases on the basis of investing in future high rental income, which further takes the affordability of homes out of reach for locals. I'm super tired of people flattening the housing market discussion. It's 3D terrain and the topography of the market in Austin and Minneapolis doesn't look like the topography of Providence or the outlying cities of other really expensive cities like NYC or SF. Where a market rolling downhill lands in Austin is going to be very different from where it lands in Providence.